Friday, June 1, 2012

Wisconsin Recall: A Battle We Can't Afford To Lose

For the progressive movement, it's put up or shut up time in Wisconsin.

We said that we despise the agenda of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. We
cheered the thousands of people who occupied the state capitol in 2011
to protest Walker's ramming legislation crippling public employee unions
through the legislature. We celebrated when a legislature recall
election led to the ousting of two of the state senators who backed the
legislation. And we were bolstered when a record number of signatures
put a Walker recall election on the ballot.

But now that it's crunch time, we are dangerously close to losing it
all. And the consequences of a recall defeat are almost impossible to
overstate. Imagine the gloating on Fox News and the right-wing blogs if
Walker wins on Tuesday, and the claims that our insurgent movement for
rebuilding the middle class is bloodied and can be left for dead.

If we are really serious about standing up against the unholy
alliance of conservative extremism and corporate money that has imposed
an austerity agenda on the working class while further enriching the
wealthy, then we need to help the people in Wisconsin who are trying
against the odds to win this Wisconsin recall.

Workers' Voice is a new political action committee affiliated with
the AFL-CIO that offers get-out-the-vote tools that leverage the power
of your social networks with information in the voter file.
You can help identify voters, make phone calls, or send your own
personalized direct mail to people you know. And you can do it all from
home, no matter where you live. And in an election race that polls suggest could go either way, every phone call, every email, every knock on a door will matter.

What has me particularly fired up is an article
progressive commentator Sally Kohn has posted on The Daily Beast, with a
headline that claims "Democrats Lose Momentum in Wisconsin: The left
has seemed more comfortable being angry than channeling that emotion
into influence."

I respect Sally Kohn and think she's a smart political analyst. But I would really like to see her proved wrong.

Her sense is that grassroots progressives did a good job pulling
together a movement based on opposition to Walker's policies—not just on
labor rights but also on a budget that, like national conservative
policies, cuts services vital to the middle class and poor while cutting
taxes to the wealthy and corporations. But the momentum fell apart when
it came time to take that energy and translate it into actual change at
the ballot box.

"Progressives have had a far harder time yoking grassroots activism
to electoral politics than conservatives, who quickly managed to
translate Tea Party rabble rousing into political power," Kohn writes.

It is true that progressives need a more solid strategy for electoral
and political gains in the face of how, with the aid of the Citizens
United ruling, the right and its corporate backers have dominated the
political landscape. That is a key focus of the Take Back the American
Dream conference, where many of the plenary meetings and strategy
sessions will be focused both on how progressives can score gains in the
November elections and on how progressives can affect the course of
economic policy during December's "taxmageddon," when Congress must
decide how to handle the expiration of the Bush tax cuts, payroll tax
relief and a deal on federal spending.

But, as The Nation's John Nichols told me in my interview with him
today, people power has already accomplished more in Wisconsin than
skeptics in either the left or the right expected. As he reminds us, the
Capitol protests were supposed to quickly fizzle, but they didn't. The
public was supposed to massively turn against supporters of public
employees, but they didn't. The Walker recall was expected to flail in
the midst of the harsh Wisconsin winter. It didn't.

So now we come to this moment, where it will become clear to the
nation whether the 99 percent can in fact use people power to push back
against the 1 percent and insist on government policies that restore a
measure of prosperity to the majority of Americans, not just those at
the very top.

Then, at our Take Back the American Dream conference, we can do the
work of building on a Wisconsin victory. That conference will feature
Paul Krugman, Van Jones, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ai-jen Poo, Sandra Fluke,
Gov. Howard Dean, Melissa Harris-Perry, Chris Hayes and Katrina vanden
Heuvel. (Click here to register.)

When you consider all that is at stake throughout the country, as
conservatives continue their assault on worker's rights and economic
security at both the state and national level, we literally cannot
afford to lose on Tuesday.